Sense and sensibilities of a writer

Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin Viking 358pp, £20 in UKFor decades the Austen biography by Elizabeth Jenkins held the field, but there has been a recent wave of new lives or studies attempting to find what Fleet Street journalists used to call "a new angle". Since no major biographical revelations about the novelist have come to light in the past twenty years, and few extra letters appear to have surfaced either, obviously it is hard to find one. Essentially Jane Austen led a confined and outwardly uninteresting life, whose outlines are reasonably familiar by now, and her letters were mostly censored or even destroyed by her family after her death. She was not a woman to give her private life away, but there was probably very little to give away in any case; she shelters behind the novels and refuses to step forward and appear centre stage.

The milieu in which her forty-two years were spent was relatively limited and parochial, even dull (though probably not to her), and her family and friends were unremarkable people - in spite of periodic efforts to prove otherwise. It is true that her elder brother Francis (who died as late as 1865, aged 91) lived to become an Admiral of the Fleet, and in general the Austens seem to have been a family with brains and energy. Yet collectively they left little mark on their time, while their children and children's children were almost anonymous. They belonged to a fairly stable middle order of society which produced clergymen, naval officers, dilettante writers and scholars, and small landowners, but they rose no higher and Claire Tomalin acknowledges that they would have been forgotten only for Jane and her books. One factor which was dominant in Jane's childhood, and continued virtually to the end of her life, was lack of money. Her mother had aristocratic connections but brought little wealth to her clergyman husband, who married young, had a large family of children, and had to supplement his living as a village rector by taking pupils (using his own house as a schoolroom, incidentally). Jane's devotion to her family has not been questioned, and she never seems to have craved fame in the vulgar sense, or the kind of social lionisation given to contemporaries such as Lady Morgan.

The fact remains that she was a superior woman, who must have yearned occasionally - finances apart - for travel abroad and for a wider range of experience and human types than a Hampshire rectory could give her. Yet her two long stays in Bath seem ultimately to have repelled rather than stimulated her, and while she enjoyed sociability she was quickly bored by "society".

After her death, her surviving family quickly constructed a conventional picture stressing her filial and domestic qualities, her serenity and contentment with her lot, her Christianity, etc. By then the Victorian Age was in sight, and the new middle-class morality demanded an idealisation of family life and marriage, almost as if these per se were an automatic guarantee of personal happiness, or at least contentment. Yet family life carries its own in-built tensions, sacrifices and frustrations, and there are hints of private disappointment in her life which are vaguely confirmed by the guarded remarks of some people in her circle. Her unmarried status, for example, may have been a deliberate choice or it may have been mainly due to force of circumstances; undoubtedly she had an early (platonic) love affair with Tom Lefroy, the supposed original of Mr Darcy and later Chief Justice of Ireland.

Since neither of them had any money, their families soon separated them, though she did not forget him easily. Later there was an offer of marriage from an older man guaranteeing security without love, which she thought over carefully and then rejected; there is also a vague tradition of an emotional attachment to some unnamed clergyman, which may be pure myth. She appears to have been an attractive woman physically, but only passably so (there is no surviving portrait, and the sketch by her sister Cassandra was not admired by those who knew her); above all she had no dowry or even the prospect of one, which was reckoned almost indispensable in those times. So Jane remained a dependent spinster in a rather straitened household, a potent economic factor in deciding her to write novels, which at first were published anonymously.

Against this are certain proofs that she liked her independence - especially when her books began to bring her in some money, to supplement her small allowance - and perhaps at heart she thought that most of the men she met were unworthy of her, or would not have understood or appreciated her qualities properly. Marriage to a writer and reputed bluestocking cannot, in any case, have appealed much to the county gentlemen or small-town bourgeoisie whom she met; and besides, Jane was known to have a tart tongue. She might, certainly, have welcomed the prospect of having children of her own but women such as she, who make excellent aunts and companions to younger people, are sometimes lacking in a strong maternal instinct of their own. In any case, all around her married women with eligible husbands and good households were dying in their prime as a result of relentless child-bearing - a feature of her world which she sometimes re marked on with a kind of sardonic irony.

Her sister and confidante Cassandra, who survived her by many years, did not marry either and seems to have ended up as a rather unaccommodating spinster. Her favourite niece Fanny, the daughter of Frank the admiral, became the rather silly-snobbish wife of a baronet and it was she who, after her father's death, destroyed the letters from Jane which he had preserved carefully for half a century. She did so without consulting anybody, and posterity may have suffered an irreparable loss; but would Jane herself really have liked posterity reading letters which were written to family members and close friends, and never intended to be seen by anybody else? After all, if our casual phone calls were secretly taped every day in order to be played back in a hundred years' time to people we never knew, how would we react? And Jane Austen was plainly a very private person, who remained obstinately reticent even after her books had begun to win her a modest share of celebrity. The modern school of biographers (though to be fair, this particular one does not) almost invariably plays a role comparable to today's paparazzi, seeking out scandal above everything else and searching for skeletons in even the dustiest cupboards. With most of the literary figures of Jane Austen's age, they have not to look far: Byron's marital break-up and alleged incest with his half-sister, Shelley's various misdemeanours, Wordsworth's illegitimate daughter, Hazlitt's disastrous infatuation with Sarah Walker, Coleridge's drug addiction, Lamb's intermittently mad sister, Keats's tuberculosis and tortured love for Fanny Brawne, Landor's flight to Italy, all offer scandal or drama ready-made. But there are no skeletons in the Austen cupboard, though there may be the ghosts of regrets, frustrations and unfulfilled hopes and dreams.

Along with the liveliness and sociability of her favourite heroine, Elizabeth Bennett, her character probably also contained a strong element of the passive resignation of Anne Elliott in Persuasion. But as Claire Tomalin admits, we all know her as an acquaintance rather than an intimate. In many or even most respects, she sounds quite an ordinary woman of her time: innately intelligent and reasonably well-read, but not an intellectual, lively but not brilliant, sensitive without being introspective, keenly observant and psychologically acute, but seldom intellectually profound or emotionally intense. Her religious beliefs were deep and genuine, but without either ecstasy or inner demons of guilt and conflict.

Predominantly, she represents the innate English liking for the via media, the national talent for moderation, compromise and good sense; which is presumably why she is one of England's best-loved writers. Yet as Claire Tomalin shows, her posthumous reputation grew very slowly - Janeolatry as we know it only really developed at the end of the 19th century, when mass editions of her books began to appear.

One wonders if the majority of these loving readers really appreciated her tartness, her telling understatement, her sophistication and her cool, distanced, very 18th-century irony? A book such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses would almost certainly have repelled and disgusted her, yet psychologically she has more in common with Laclos than it may seem at first glance; I suspect that this vicar's daughter was at heart very hard to shock. When she began to write, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne were only a stage or two behind her in the literary past - though she may have preferred The Vicar of Wakefield or Fanny Burney. That she became, posthumously, a model for tranquil domestic fiction is surely a considerable irony in itself. This biography is readable without being memorable, and much of it (including the illustrations) almost inevitably trots along a familiar track in the footmarks of others. After all, there is not much to go on in a narrative sense, and certainly nothing startling to reveal, so Claire Tomalin is driven at times to summarising the plots of the novels - which she might have presumed us to have read. In a final note on Jane Austen's illness, she quotes medical opinion but does not push her own; it may have been Addison's disease, caused by tuberculosis of the adrenal glands, or it may have been a lymphoma such as Hodgkin's disease. Whichever it was, it was outside the compass of the medicine of the early 19th century to cure or even cope with; so Sanditon remains unfinished.